Archive for the ‘current events’ category

A few months ago, facial masks were rarely seen in public, and there was little interest in them. With the Coronavirus pandemic, however, masks literally became “must have” items almost overnight. Your choices in them were originally quite limited and dreary, but demand has spawned a thriving cottage industry dedicated to their creation and marketing in an otherwise mostly depressed economy…

From just a few listings, places like eBay now offer for sale literally thousands of different homemade cloth masks in a dizzying array of colors, patterns, and presented images. They have become almost fashion accessories, an expression of personal interests and identity. One may procure a facial mask that proclaims one’s favorite sports team, or represents an affiliation or hobby.- – Who knows where a comment about one’s “cute mask” might lead? (from a safe distance, of course!)

The proliferation of more colorful and creative masks has become almost a daily Halloween for the masses, kind of a passive outreach tool in an age of social distancing. So will you be a face mask fashionista?- – Show your colors! What will your mask reveal about your inner self?!

As Billy Joel’s lyrics noted in The Stranger,

“Well, we all have a face

That we hide away forever

And we take them out

And show ourselves when everyone has gone

Some are satin, some are steel

Some are silk and some are leather

They’re the faces of a stranger

But we’d love to try them on”

In a way, self-disclosure can be quite…liberating! May we all have a happy, more nearly-normal June…

Just as it appeared that we had no defense against the nasty and invasive murder hornets, a champion appears who can beat them at their own game…the praying mantis! We haven’t seen a battle this epic since Species 8472 handily beat The Borg in Star Trek. Come to think of it, Species 8472 somewhat resemble praying mantids, who do look rather alien with their triangular heads and all. It’s a good thing that they don’t grow to six feet in size, or they might want a piece of our action…

It’s no mercy in a viral video depicting such a match-up between the hornet and the mantis, who gets right to work, latching onto the hornet, and eating his head! Yes, this video is not for the squeamish. As the hornet operates more through nerve ganglias than a brain, the remaining parts of the hornet continue to try and sting the mantis, all in vain. – – Can we get a collective ewww here? Thank you…

So it would appear that the bad boys of buzzdom can be beaten, and it’s all in a day’s work for our backyard beneficial buddy, the praying mantis. He’s mean and green.- – Who can blame him for doing a victory dance? Oh yeah, who’s bad?!

In a memorable 2009 commercial for Sears Optical that we’ve posted about much earlier , a woman in dire need of an eye exam invites a raccoon inside her house, thinking that the raccoon was her cat. In that commercial, the raccoon happily complies with the woman’s invitation to ‘snuggle with Momma,’ and pads into the house.

Real life encounters with a raccoon inside human habitations have not been so harmonious, however. In February of 2014, a woman in Hingham, Massachusetts was attacked by a raccoon that entered her house through a door flap that her cat used to get inside the dwelling, biting and cutting the 73-year-old resident . More recently in Hamden, Connecticut an 88-year-old woman was attacked August 24th by a raccoon she accidentally let into her house and then tried to pet, thinking that the animal was her cat. The raccoon had followed the woman’s cat into the house, making scratching sounds outside a sliding glass door that the woman had thought emanated from the cat. Thinking little of the woman’s affections, it bit her on the elbow, hand, forearm, lip, and chin.

The encounter didn’t go well for the raccoon, either. When police were summoned to the residence, it gamely charged two officers, who caught and euthanized the animal. The outcome could have been vastly different with Rocket Raccoon, however,who could have taken those guys out without breaking a sweat, demonstrating his profound mastery of weaponry in the process! – – Oh, yeah!

— As we enter Easter week, it would seem thatPeter Rottentail made an appearance at past Easter egg hunts at Bancroft Park in Colorado Springs, causing that event to be cancelled because of some parents leaping over guide ropes to blatantly grab eggs for their children! This avarice caused other children to go eggless while some raked in the eggs, and kinda spoiled the supposed mood of the event. We will bypass tempting economic and political analogies represented by this occurrence to state the seemingly obvious to the offending parents and their ideological clones elsewhere: egg hunts are for kids, to paraphrase the great Trix Rabbit, who can teach us much about the nature of desire, frustration, and deprivation. –Wise, long-suffering Trix Rabbit! One may learn so much from him, and profit from his instruction! But I digress…

Things seldom get as distasteful and as thoroughly messed up as when parents seek to live vicariously through their children, expressing their greed and Alpha-male dominance needs through them. We can see this mentality represented in youth sporting events where some parents convey the notion through action and word that yes, winning is everything! Some even curse other child competitors, or get into physical altercations with other parents. It’s a mentality that their child is the only one in the universe, or that in a world of supposed equality, some are more equal than others, remembering George Orwell.

I shall mourn the tainting of the humble and lovely tradition of the Easter Egg hunt, which was never intended to be an ego-invested greed fest. Perhaps it is as worldly philosopher Homer Simpson once observed that we all want the same thing: preferential treatment!

– – It’s Halloween, Foxsylvanians, that most special day of the year to me, and I would be much amiss if I didn’t wish each and every one of my valued readers a frightful and delightful day! Enjoy the day, and Get your roar on!